Mo' Real

A small group of social activists, journalists, and filmmakers has begun using Second Life to start covering the news. Leading the charge is Draxtor Despres [aka Bernhard Drax, a 38-year-old, Munich-born machinima hobbyist living in Pacific Grove, California]. Drax recently posted a report on YouTube telling how the incoming Obama Administration will use Second Life to help engage the public over health care reform. Here's that report, virtual video-style, below. [NOTE: Draxtor is the suited avatar with headphones.]



Drax, who has been experimenting with Second Life as a medium for news for nearly the past year, received international recognition in mid-December for his efforts [and recognition for Second Life as a new information medium] during the Paris celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There, Drax was awarded an "Every Human Has Rights" media award for his SL report, "Virtual Guantanamo," a feature story on the "virtual Gitmo" built in Second Life by filmmaker Nonny del la Pena and Peggy Weil, a professor at the University of Southern California. Their work, "Gone Gitmo," offers viewers an immersive experience about what it's like (no, really) to be a prisoner at Gitmo. See Drax's award-winning report, below:



Drax uses screen capture software to film events and gather interviews. Douglas Thomas, the director of USC's Network Culture Project, predicts an expansion this year in the use of the medium in education, journalism, and social advocacy, saying many nonprofits and social advocates also might start using Second Life as a new storytelling medium for encouraging public engagement in their causes. Says Drax: "How can we improve the real world? That's what I'm trying to focus on in Second Life." Drax will start filing reports next month from this virutal world for PBS's Frontline World. Said Drax, in accepting the award in Paris: "I'm proud I've gotten this award but it's a signal that this is viable, that this is legitimate, that this [SL] is not a game."

For more on the development of virtual worlds for social change, check out Games for Change co-founder Suzanne Seggerman and her work by clicking here to see her talk at the recent Pop!Tech 2008. Also check out Contribute Magazine's special report, The Cause Web, [September/October 2007], chiefly the story, Pixelanthropy, about the trend toward nonprofit activism in Second Life.

iWitness

Twitter has broken news—first—yet again, in a potent reminder that microblogging content may not always be so emphemeral [nor widely unimportant], after all. [Social activists, listen up.] Minutes after U.S. Airways flight 1549 crash-landed in the Hudson River earlier today, 23-year-old Janis Krums, a resident of Sarasota, Florida [who was on a river ferry that was among the first to get diverted to the scene], used his iPhone to snap this photo, above, of the downed plane and post it on Twitter. The photo apparently was the first in the overall news coverage of the event today and immediately went hyper-viral: 34 minutes after Janis posted his photo, MSNBC interviewed him live on TV as a witness; by this evening, thousands of people online had seen it and the New York Daily News is reporting that the surge of interest in Krums' photo has caused TwitPic to crash. Citizen journalists, many of them using Twitter, also played a role in the coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks in November and the U.S. presidential election in November.

Look for more ordinary people, as well as social activists, to get more proactive in using their social media this way—to bear witness as things are happening rather than further after the fact. We're all first-responders now; social media and the immediacy they offer to our knowledge of the unfolding events around us are redefining what is meant by "breaking news."

Krums' tweet and photo, posted on TwitPic at 12:36 pm today, read as follows:
http://twitpic.com/135xa - There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy."

Vlogspotting

Video blogging—vlogging–seems more cause-minded than ever.

New-and-improved digital video-sharing sites with names like Vimeo, blip.tv, Flickr video, Seesmic, and Viddler are making it easier for citizen activists to share their concerns about the world around them. One new storytelling form emerging on these sites is the short, "cause vlog" —brief, home-made mini-documentaries meant to create community around issues close to home.

Here are a couple of recent examples:

* Bike-Lane Emergency from Nicholas Whitaker on Vimeo. Whitaker attaches his camera to his handlebars and takes us for a dangerous, humorous spin through the streets of New York City.




* River Reactions from Kevin Co on Vimeo. Co uses a combination of news and original footage to raise safety concerns over the proposed construction of a nuclear reactor in his Yukon River village in Alaska.




Want to distribute your cause vlog globally? That's easier now, too: Dot.sub is a Web service that lets cause activists publish their docs with subtitles in other languages—and makes it possible for others to add subtitles of their own, in other languages. Viewers, meanwhile, can choose their preferred language for watching.

Founder Michael Smolens wanted to substantially remove language and cost as a barrier to cross-cultural communication using video. "I remember thinking after I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 that if one documentary film in English could have an impact on a very close U.S. Presidential election, imagine if all independent and documentary films, TV programming, and video from all cultures could be made available in all languages," Smollen says.

Look for wider use of vlogging by nonprofits in coming months. Here's how one, the global citizen news community, Rising Voices, is using dotSUB to distribute an informational video about its work in more than a dozen languages. Click here to see its vlog.

The New Watchdogs

I’m sitting in a movie theater just outside Washington that is jammed with cause advocates, filmmakers, philanthropists, and nonprofit leaders. It’s the second day of SilverDOCS, one of the nation's top documentary film conferences, and attendees are buzzing about the transformative power of digital storytelling to engage audiences and create social change locally and globally. This is an edgy, influential crowd: 108 long and short documentaries from 64 countries are being screened here this week; most were made to expose global social ills.

I’m thinking about Tom Bettag—a lot. In May 2001, some four months before 9/11—a day the world got smaller—Bettag, then the executive producer of ABC's Nightline, invited me to attend a conference at Columbia University. Ironically, he and other top journalists were meeting to explore how new digital video technologies—then just emerging—could be used to fight moves by network cost-cutters to slash foreign news budgets and close overseas news bureaus.

Bettag did not hide his frustration. "They (TV executives) say Americans don’t care much about foreign news but that’s a canard put out by the accountants," he told those gathered at Columbia. Presciently, Bettag knew the digital video revolution would make foreign news-gathering far less costly and give more power to those in the field. Why not move immediately, then, to proliferate the technology and give Americans a more authentic, urgent knowledge of the world?

Fast-forward seven years. Much has changed—and hasn't. Digital video documentaries—"cause news docs"—are the hot new medium of the moment. News budgets are still under assault.

Bettag's 2001 activism came to mind this morning, when Michael Markarian, the executive vice president of The Humane Society of the United States and author of a blog called Animals and Politics, spoke on a SilverDOCS panel about the erosion of traditional news gathering, this time by newspapers. “Big cuts in news journalism staff, in funding for investigative journalism and the rapid decline of newspapers is affecting advocacy and is having an impact on documentary filmmakers, as well,” Markarian said.

Markarian knows this well. One of today's "cause-news docs" producers, Markarian in January famously drummed up more than a half-million hits to the Humane Society's fundraising Web site after posting a digital video investigation by his staff that reported the abuse of downed cattle at a California slaughterhouse. In the video, Humane Society executives said the poking, prodding, and forklifting of sick and downed cows there endangered food safety in school lunchrooms across America. CNN and The Associated Press picked up the humane society's story, pretty much unquestioned, and it led to the recall of 145 million pounds of ground beef, the temporary removal of beef from many school lunch menus, and eight congressional hearings exploring the possibility of a link between animal cruelty and food safety. The story also helped the Humane Society raise millions of dollars in new and expanded donations.

“Obviously,” Markarian said, “the news media is changing but the issues remain—so it’s falling more and more to advocacy groups to investigate and uncover what’s happening and play the role of the watchdog in society, which the media are playing less and less.”

Maybe so. Hooray for a concerned, enlivened citizenry. But is this new "cause-news docs" movement entirely a good thing? When does advocacy become propaganda?

Seven years ago, Bettag and other journalists worried about whether the American public was getting enough information. Now—with nonprofits and philanthropists increasingly using digital video technologies to create their own news stories on social issues near and dear to their hearts—there’s a question of whether the public is getting enough of the right information.

Markarian's story, for example, did not include interviews with outside experts, independent food safety officials, meatpacking officials, slaughterhouse managers, or government regulators. It did not investigate the source of the problem nor prove that the abuse had, in fact, tainted the public food supply. (The slaughterhouse, for example, when finally questioned much later, said the cows in question were never processed into food and that forklifts were required to move them, since they couldn't walk or stand by themselves.) Further, the only people quoted in the Humane Society video were employees of the Humane Society, convinced that what was happening at the slaughterhouse was abuse and that the abuse was threatening the health of millions. (see video clip, below)

Appropriately, one SilverDOCS panel was entitled “Is it Propaganda? Using Media as a Tool for Social Change.” Markarian was there. So was Sameer Padania, the director of The Hub, a Web site that debuted in December that offers video training to citizen news documentarians. The Hub is part of the nonprofit Witness, which gives people digital video cameras so they can document human rights abuses around the world. Padania says that ideally, The Hub “will be a platform eventually for citizens, filmmakers, and news organizations to pull together.” Its motto: See it. Film it. Change it.

To be sure, this is a critical, exciting time for filmmakers and journalists—one filled with tremendous opportunity. But even some of the new citizen journalists are starting to question the rise of partisan media. Ethan Zuckerman, the cofounder of Global Voices Online, a new international news site that aggregates news blogs from around the world, asked recently: “Should we expect that people are aware that media has changed and that they should expect every voice to have strong, visible bias? Or is there a need to re-learn how to read/view both online and offline media to understand that we’ve got far more activist media and far less neutrality?”

Back in 2001, Bettag (now the top documentary film producer for the Discovery Channel, a cosponsor of the SilverDOCS festival) and Parisa Khosravi, CNN's chief of international news gathering, warned that the digital storytelling movement would bring with it a critical need to guard against staged news events, misleading and one-sided reporting, inaccurate assertions and lack of context. “It’s going to take some people who have great journalistic voices who know how to tell a story extremely well” to do it properly, Bettag had said. “There are going to be a lot of people who are going to do it irresponsibly, and they will make people hesistant.”

The Humane Society's Markarian, today defending his efforts and those of other nonprofits to break news, says he's confident that viewers "know propaganda when they see it."

But do they? If propaganda is really good, it feels like fact. Let’s hope that citizen media activists of all stripes keep trying, at least, to recognize the difference.

To view the Humane Society's digital video investigation, click on the screen below: